Commonplaces

 Magritte: The Lovers

When you're in the kind of transition that I am, one of the things both comforting and embarrassing is how much of yourself you can hear reflected in popular music, most of which has but one theme. Rod Stewart's "Reason To Believe" came to mind as I was drinking my coffee this morning. At least you know you are not alone, but you also know that you are just as much of a dope as the rest of the populace. As one of my sisters always says, "Betweeen IQ and EQ, big difference." Me? For IQ, serious brainiac. EQ? Borderline retarded.

Interesting dream last night. Civilization had completely fallen apart and I was working with two men --on another planet, in outer space--to retrieve words and deeds: to save human language was one man's task (and for that reason he didn't talk very much) and the other's was to gather all the knowledge about how to make things, from a toothbrush to a hockey stick. My particular interest was in finding the oldest and most ancient story of the hero, the first story humans ever told. I was searching for his name.

I was thinking of the Tower of Babel the other day. Yeah, really. You're not really surprised, are you? The result of trying to overstep the inborn limits of man led not to a unified triumph of architecture, but the estrangement of one group and individual from another, chaos and division. Conservatives are conscious of limits, perhaps before all else. But there is a drive both in the West and especially in America to believe that man is without limits. We tell our children that they can be anything they want to be. Well, they can't. I could have been a professor of Italian literature or a constitutional lawyer, but I could never have been a painter or jet pilot (being color blind), or an NFL football player or an opera singer. Nevah gunna happen. And now we think that every ethnic and racial group is equally good at everything, that two men can make a marriage and that diversity is our strength. Babble.

Has any other civilization in history decided to unravel its structures of privilege --and every society has and needs them--simply because they were perceived to be wrong? To bend over backwards, repeatedly and abjectly, to accommodate and placate former slaves, females, foreigners (including hostile foreigners), cripples, sexual deviants, atheists and crazed pet lovers? I can think of no historical precedent where a thriving civilization overnight decided to commit suicide at the hands of people it had previously, and often with very good reason, kept in second place? As the King of Siam said, Is a puzzlement.

Perhaps it's the unreality and hubris lurking within the Enlightenment project, one of whose urges was to liberate man from local particularities and to discover oddities like The Universal Rights of Man. There is a huge amount of abstraction in the Enlightenment, although its proponents probably never meant it to be taken so literally. Unintended consequences.

Judge Vaughn can assert ex cathedra without irony that "gender difference is no longer essential to marriage." Well, hell, the International Mr. Leather judges, guardians of homosexual male worship of the hypermasculine, recently concluded that being born with a dick and balls and a Y chromosome is no longer essential to being a man.
In England, atheist Gentiles have decided that you can still be a Jew without having a Jewish mother*. Next thing you know, having a primary attachment to and preference for America will no longer be a requirement for the Presidency.

*In the name of multiculturalism, a government body has overturned a cherished value of a cultural minority. What are the chances of them saying that clitoridectomy is child abuse? Though if they do, they will likely have to outlaw male circumcision...of infants, letting Muslims do it at puberty, of course, as a religious choice.